The Altar Steps by Compton MacKenzie

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"It's the curse of the day," he used to assert, "this pampering of
children with an individual religion. They get into the habit of
thinking God is their special property and when they get older and find
he isn't, as often as not they give up religion altogether, because it
doesn't happen to fit in with the spoilt notions they got hold of as
infants."

Mark's bringing up was the only thing in which Mrs. Lidderdale did not
give way to her husband. She was determined that he should not have a
Cockney accent, and without irritating her husband any more than was
inevitable she was determined that he should not gobble down his
religion as a solid indigestible whole. On this point she even went so
far as directly to contradict the boy's father and argue that an
intelligent boy like Mark was likely to vomit up such an indigestible
whole later on, although she did not make use of such a coarse
expression.

"All mothers think their sons are the cleverest in the world."

"But, James, he _is_ an exceptionally clever little boy. Most observant,
with a splendid memory and plenty of imagination."

"Too much imagination. His nights are one long circus."

"But, James, you yourself have insisted so often on the personal Devil;
you can't expect a little boy of Mark's sensitiveness not to be
impressed by your picture."

"He has nothing to fear from the Devil, if he behaves himself. Haven't I
made that clear?"

Mrs. Lidderdale sighed.

"But, James dear, a child's mind is so literal, and though I know you
insist just as much on the reality of the Saints and Angels, a child's
mind is always most impressed by the things that have power to frighten
it."

"I want him to be frightened by Evil," declared James. "But go your own
way. Soften down everything in our Holy Religion that is ugly and
difficult. Sentimentalize the whole business. That's our modern method
in everything."

This was one of many arguments between husband and wife about the
religious education of their son.

Luckily for Mark his father had too many children, real children and
grown up children, in the Mission to be able to spend much time with his
son; and the teaching of Sunday morning, the clear-cut uncompromising
statement of hard religious facts in which the Missioner delighted, was
considerably toned down by his wife's gentle commentary.

Mark's mother taught him that the desire of a bad boy to be a good boy
is a better thing than the goodness of a Jack Horner. She taught him
that God was not merely a crotchety old gentleman reclining in a blue
dressing-gown on a mattress of cumulus, but that He was an Eye, an
all-seeing Eye, an Eye capable indeed of flashing with rage, yet so
rarely that whenever her little boy should imagine that Eye he might
behold it wet with tears.

"But can God cry?" asked Mark incredulously.

"Oh, darling. God can do everything."

"But fancy crying! If I could do everything I shouldn't cry."

Mrs. Lidderdale perceived that her picture of the wise and compassionate
Eye would require elaboration.

"But do you only cry, Mark dear, when you can't do what you want? Those
are not nice tears. Don't you ever cry because you're sorry you've been
disobedient?"

"I don't think so, Mother," Mark decided after a pause. "No, I don't
think I cry because I'm sorry except when you're sorry, and that
sometimes makes me cry. Not always, though. Sometimes I'm glad you're
sorry. I feel so angry that I like to see you sad."

"But you don't often feel like that?"

"No, not often," he admitted.

"But suppose you saw somebody being ill-treated, some poor dog or cat
being teased, wouldn't you feel inclined to cry?"

"Oh, no," Mark declared. "I get quite red inside of me, and I want to
kick the people who is doing it."

"Well, now you can understand why God sometimes gets angry. But even if
He gets angry," Mrs. Lidderdale went on, for she was rather afraid of
her son's capacity for logic, "God never lets His anger get the better
of Him. He is not only sorry for the poor dog, but He is also sorry for
the poor person who is ill-treating the dog. He knows that the poor
person has perhaps never been taught better, and then the Eye fills with
tears again."

"I think I like Jesus better than God," said Mark, going off at a
tangent. He felt that there were too many points of resemblance between
his own father and God to make it prudent to persevere with the
discussion. On the subject of his father he always found his mother
strangely uncomprehending, and the only times she was really angry with
him was when he refused out of his basic honesty to admit that he loved
his father.

"But Our Lord _is_ God," Mrs. Lidderdale protested.

Mark wrinkled his face in an effort to confront once more this eternal
puzzle.

"Don't you remember, darling, three Persons and one God?"

Mark sighed.

"You haven't forgotten that clover-leaf we picked one day in Kensington
Gardens?"

"When we fed the ducks on the Round Pond?"

"Yes, darling, but don't think about ducks just now. I want you to think
about the Holy Trinity."

"But I can't understand the Holy Trinity, Mother," he protested.

"Nobody can understand the Holy Trinity. It is a great mystery."

"Mystery," echoed Mark, taking pleasure in the word. It always thrilled
him, that word, ever since he first heard it used by Dora the servant
when she could not find her rolling-pin.

"Well, where that rolling-pin's got to is a mystery," she had declared.

Then he had seen the word in print. The Coram Street Mystery. All about
a dead body. He had pronounced it "micetery" at first, until he had been
corrected and was able to identify the word as the one used by Dora
about her rolling-pin. History stood for the hard dull fact, and mystery
stood for all that history was not. There were no dates in "mystery:"
Mark even at seven years, such was the fate of intelligent precocity,
had already had to grapple with a few conspicuous dates in the immense
tale of humanity. He knew for instance that William the Conqueror landed
in 1066, and that St. Augustine landed in 596, and that Julius Caesar
landed, but he could never remember exactly when. The last time he was
asked that date, he had countered with a request to know when Noah had
landed.

"The Holy Trinity is a mystery."

It belonged to the category of vanished rolling-pins and dead bodies
huddled up in dustbins: it had no date.

But what Mark liked better than speculations upon the nature of God were
the tales that were told like fairy tales without its seeming to matter
whether you remembered them or not, and which just because it did not
matter you were able to remember so much more easily. He could have
listened for ever to the story of the lupinseeds that rattled in their
pods when the donkey was trotting with the boy Christ and His mother and
St. Joseph far away from cruel Herod into Egypt and how the noise of the
rattling seeds nearly betrayed their flight and how the plant was cursed
for evermore and made as hungry as a wolf. And the story of how the
robin tried to loosen one of the cruel nails so that the blood from the
poor Saviour drenched his breast and stained it red for evermore, and of
that other bird, the crossbill, who pecked at the nails until his beak
became crossed. He could listen for ever to the tale of St. Cuthbert who
was fed by ravens, of St. Martin who cut off his cloak and gave it to a
beggar, of St. Anthony who preached to the fishes, of St. Raymond who
put up his cowl and floated from Spain to Africa like a nautilus, of St.
Nicolas who raised three boys from the dead after they had been killed
and cut up and salted in a tub by a cruel man that wanted to eat them,
and of that strange insect called a Praying Mantis which alighted upon
St. Francis' sleeve and sang the _Nunc Dimittis_ before it flew away.

These were all stories that made bedtime sweet, stories to remember and
brood upon gratefully in the darkness of the night when he lay awake and
when, alas, other stories less pleasant to recall would obtrude
themselves.

Mark was not brought up luxuriously in the Lima Street Mission House,
and the scarcity of toys stimulated his imagination. All his toys were
old and broken, because he was only allowed to have the toys left over
at the annual Christmas Tree in the Mission Hall; and since even the
best of toys on that tree were the cast-offs of rich little children
whose parents performed a vicarious act of charity in presenting them to
the poor, it may be understood that Mark's share of these was not
calculated to spoil him. His most conspicuous toy was a box of mutilated
grenadiers, whose stands had been melted by their former owner in the
first rapture of discovering that lead melts in fire and who in
consequence were only able to stand up uncertainly when stuck into
sliced corks.

Luckily Mark had better armies of his own in the coloured lines that
crossed the blankets of his bed. There marched the crimson army of St.
George, the blue army of St. Andrew, the green army of St. Patrick, the
yellow army of St. David, the rich sunset-hued army of St. Denis, the
striped armies of St. Anthony and St. James. When he lay awake in the
golden light of the morning, as golden in Lima Street as anywhere else,
he felt ineffably protected by the Seven Champions of Christendom; and
sometimes even at night he was able to think that with their bright
battalions they were still marching past. He used to lie awake,
listening to the sparrows and wondering what the country was like and
most of all the sea. His father would not let him go into the country
until he was considered old enough to go with one of the annual school
treats. His mother told him that the country in Cornwall was infinitely
more beautiful than Kensington Gardens, and that compared with the sea
the Serpentine was nothing at all. The sea! He had heard it once in a
prickly shell, and it had sounded beautiful. As for the country he had
read a story by Mrs. Ewing called _Our Field_, and if the country was
the tiniest part as wonderful as that, well . . . meanwhile Dora brought
him back from the greengrocer's a pot of musk, which Mark used to sniff
so enthusiastically that Dora said he would sniff it right away if he
wasn't careful. Later on when Lima Street was fetid in the August sun he
gave this pot of musk to a little girl with a broken leg, and when she
died in September her mother put it on her grave.

CHAPTER IV

HUSBAND AND WIFE

Mark was impressed by the appearance of the Bishop of Devizes; a portly
courtly man, he brought to the dingy little Mission House in Lima Street
that very sense of richness and grandeur which Mark had anticipated. The
Bishop's pink plump hands of which he made such use contrasted with the
lean, scratched, and grimy hands of his father; the Bishop's hair white
and glossy made his father's bristly, badly cut hair look more bristly
and worse cut than ever, and the Bishop's voice ripe and unctuous grew
more and more mellow as his father's became harsher and more assertive.
Mark found himself thinking of some lines in _The Jackdaw of Rheims_
about a cake of soap worthy of washing the hands of the Pope. The Pope
would have hands like the Bishop's, and Mark who had heard a great deal
about the Pope looked at the Bishop of Devizes with added interest.

"While we are at lunch, Mr. Lidderdale, you will I am sure pardon me for
referring again to our conversation of this morning from another point
of view--the point of view, if I may use so crude an expression, the
point of view of--er--expediency. Is it wise?"

"I'm not a wise man, my lord."

"Pardon me, my dear Mr. Lidderdale, but I have not completed my
question. Is it right? Is it right when you have an opportunity to
consolidate your great work . . . I use the adjective advisedly and with
no intention to flatter you, for when I had the privilege this morning
of accompanying you round the beautiful edifice that has been by your
efforts, by your self-sacrifice, by your eloquence, and by your devotion
erected to the glory of God . . . I repeat, Mr. Lidderdale, is it right
to fling all this away for the sake of a few--you will not
misunderstand me--if I call them a few excrescences?"

The Bishop helped himself to the cauliflower and paused to give his
rhetoric time to work.

"What you regard, my lord, as excrescences I regard as fundamentals of
our Holy Religion."

"Come, come, Mr. Lidderdale," the Bishop protested. "I do not think that
you expect to convince me that a ceremony like the--er--Asperges is a
fundamental of Christianity."

"I have taught my people that it is," said the Missioner. "In these days
when Bishops are found who will explain away the Incarnation, the
Atonement, the Resurrection of the Body, I hope you'll forgive a humble
parish priest who will explain away nothing and who would rather resign,
as I told you this morning, than surrender a single one of these
excrescences."

"I do not admit your indictment, your almost wholesale indictment of the
Anglican episcopate; but even were I to admit at lunch that some of my
brethren have been in their anxiety to keep the Man in the Street from
straying too far from the Church, have been as I was saying a little too
ready to tolerate a certain latitude of belief, even as I said just now
were that so, I do not think that you have any cause to suspect me of
what I should repudiate as gross infidelity. It was precisely because
the Bishop of London supposed that I should be more sympathetic with
your ideals that he asked me to represent him in this perfectly
informal--er--"

"Inquest," the Missioner supplied with a fierce smile.

The Bishop encouraged by the first sign of humour he had observed in the
bigoted priest hastened to smile back.

"Well, let us call it an inquest, but not, I hope, I sincerely and
devoutly hope, Mr. Lidderdale, not an inquest upon a dead body." Then
hurriedly he went on. "I may smile with the lips, but believe me, my
dear fellow labourer in the vineyard of Our Lord Jesus Christ, believe
me that my heart is sore at the prospect of your resignation. And the
Bishop of London, if I have to go back to him with such news, will be
pained, bitterly grievously pained. He admires your work, Mr.
Lidderdale, as much as I do, and I have no doubt that if it were not
for the unhappy controversies that are tearing asunder our National
Church, I say I do not doubt that he would give you a free hand. But how
can he give you a free hand when his own hands are tied by the
necessities of the situation? May I venture to observe that some of you
working priests are too ready to criticize men like myself who from no
desire of our own have been called by God to occupy a loftier seat in
the eyes of the world than many men infinitely more worthy. But to
return to the question immediately before us, let me, my dear Mr.
Lidderdale, do let me make to you a personal appeal for moderation. If
you will only consent to abandon one or two--I will not say excrescences
since you object to the word--but if you will only abandon one or two
purely ceremonial additions that cannot possibly be defended by any
rubric in the Book of Common Prayer, if you will only consent to do this
the Bishop of London will, I can guarantee, permit you a discretionary
latitude that he would scarcely be prepared to allow to any other priest
in his diocese. When I was called to be Bishop Suffragan of Devizes, Mr.
Lidderdale, do you suppose that I did not give up something? Do you
suppose that I was anxious to abandon some of the riches to which by my
reading of the Ornaments Rubric we are entitled? But I felt that I could
do something to help the position of my fellow priests struggling
against the prejudice of ignorance and the prey of political moves. In
twenty years from now, Mr. Lidderdale, you will be glad you took my
advice. Ceremonies that to-day are the privilege of the few will then be
the privilege of the many. Do not forget that by what I might almost
describe as the exorbitance of your demands you have gained more freedom
than any other priest in England. Be moderate. Do not resign. You will
be inhibited in every diocese; you will have the millstone of an unpaid
debt round your neck; you are a married man."

"That has nothing . . ." Lidderdale interrupted angrily.

"Pray let me finish. You are a married man, and if you should seek
consolation, where several of your fellow priests have lately sought it,
in the Church of Rome, you will have to seek it as a layman. I do not
pretend to know your private affairs, and I should consider it
impertinent if I tried to pry into them at such a moment. But I do know
your worth as a priest, and I have no hesitation in begging you once
more with a heart almost too full for words to pause, Mr. Lidderdale, to
pause and reflect before you take the irreparable step that you are
contemplating. I have already talked too much, and I see that your good
wife is looking anxiously at my plate. No more cauliflower, thank you,
Mrs. Lidderdale, no more of anything, thank you. Ah, there is a pudding
on the way? Dear me, that sounds very tempting, I'm afraid."

The Bishop now turned his attention entirely to Mrs. Lidderdale at the
other end of the table; the Missioner sat biting his nails; and Mark
wondered what all this conversation was about.

While the Bishop was waiting for his cab, which, he explained to his
hosts, was not so much a luxury as a necessity owing to his having to
address at three o'clock precisely a committee of ladies who were
meeting in Portman Square to discuss the dreadful condition of the
London streets, he laid a fatherly arm on the Missioner's threadbare
cassock.

"Take two or three days to decide, my dear Mr. Lidderdale. The Bishop of
London, who is always consideration personified, insisted that you were
to take two or three days to decide. Once more, for I hear my
cab-wheels, once more let me beg you to yield on the following points.
Let me just refer to my notes to be sure that I have not omitted
anything of importance. Oh, yes, the following points: no Asperges, no
unusual Good Friday services, except of course the Three Hours. _Is_ not
that enough?"

"The Three Hours I _would_ give up. It's a modern invention of the
Jesuits. The Adoration of the Cross goes back. . . ."

"Please, please, Mr. Lidderdale, my cab is at the door. We must not
embark on controversy. No celebrations without communicants. No direct
invocation of the Blessed Virgin Mary or the Saints. Oh, yes, and on
this the Bishop is particularly firm: no juggling with the _Gloria in
Excelsis_. Good-bye, Mr. Lidderdale, good-bye, Mrs. Lidderdale. Many
thanks for your delicious luncheon. Good-bye, young man. I had a little
boy like you once, but he is grown up now, and I am glad to say a
soldier."

The Bishop waved his umbrella, which looked much like a pastoral staff,
and lightly mounted the step of his cab.

"Was the Bishop cross with Father?" Mark inquired afterward; he could
find no other theory that would explain so much talking to his father,
so little talking by his father.

"Dearest, I'd rather you didn't ask questions about the Bishop," his
mother replied, and discerning that she was on the verge of one of those
headaches that while they lasted obliterated the world for Mark, he was
silent. Later in the afternoon Mr. Astill, the Vicar, came round to see
the Missioner and they had a long talk together, the murmur of which now
softer now louder was audible in Mark's nursery where he was playing by
himself with the cork-bottomed grenadiers. His instinct was to play a
quiet game, partly on account of his mother's onrushing headache, which
had already driven her to her room, partly because he knew that when his
father was closeted like this it was essential not to make the least
noise. So he tiptoed about the room and disposed the cork-bottomed
grenadiers as sentinels before the coal-scuttle, the washstand, and
other similar strongholds. Then he took his gun, the barrel of which,
broken before it was given to him, had been replaced by a thin bamboo
curtain-rod, and his finger on the trigger (a wooden match) he waited
for an invader. After ten minutes of statuesque silence Mark began to
think that this was a dull game, and he wished that his mother had not
gone to her room with a headache, because if she had been with him she
could have undoubtedly invented, so clever was she, a method of invading
the nursery without either the attackers or the defenders making any
noise about it. In her gentle voice she would have whispered of the
hordes that were stealthily creeping up the mountain side until Mark and
his vigilant cork-bottomed grenadiers would have been in a state of
suppressed exultation ready to die in defence of the nursery, to die
stolidly and silently at their posts with nobody else in the house aware
of their heroism.

"Rorke's Drift," said Mark to himself, trying to fancy that he heard in
the distance a Zulu _impi_ and whispering to his cork-bottomed
grenadiers to keep a good look-out. One of them who was guarding the
play-cupboard fell over on his face, and in the stillness the noise
sounded so loud that Mark did not dare cross the room to put him up
again, but had to assume that he had been shot where he stood. It was no
use. The game was a failure; Mark decided to look at _Battles of the
British Army_. He knew the pictures in every detail, and he could have
recited without a mistake the few lines of explanation at the bottom of
each page; but the book still possessed a capacity to thrill, and he
turned over the pages not pausing over Crecy or Poitiers or Blenheim or
Dettingen; but enjoying the storming of Badajoz with soldiers impaled on
_chevaux de frise_ and lingering over the rich uniforms and plumed
helmets in the picture of Joseph Bonaparte's flight at Vittoria. There
was too a grim picture of the Guards at Inkerman fighting in their
greatcoats with clubbed muskets against thousands of sinister dark green
Russians looming in the snow; and there was an attractive picture of a
regiment crossing the Alma and eating the grapes as they clambered up
the banks where they grew. Finally there was the Redan, a mysterious
wall, apparently of wickerwork, with bombs bursting and broken
scaling-ladders and dead English soldiers in the open space before it.

Mark did not feel that he wanted to look through the book again, and he
put it away, wondering how long that murmur of voices rising and falling
from his father's study below would continue. He wondered whether Dora
would be annoyed if he went down to the kitchen. She had been
discouraging on the last two or three occasions he had visited her, but
that had been because he could not keep his fingers out of the currants.
Fancy having a large red jar crammed full of currants on the floor of
the larder and never wanting to eat one! The thought of those currants
produced in Mark's mouth a craving for something sweet, and as quietly
as possible he stole off downstairs to quench this craving somehow or
other if it were only with a lump of sugar. But when he reached the
kitchen he found Dora in earnest talk with two women in bonnets, who
were nodding away and clicking their tongues with pleasure.

"Now whatever do you want down here?" Dora demanded ungraciously.

"I wanted," Mark paused. He longed to say "some currants," but he had
failed before, and he substituted "a lump of sugar." The two women in
bonnets looked at him and nodded their heads and clicked their tongues.

"Did you ever?" said one.

"Fancy! A lump of sugar! Goodness gracious!"

"What a sweet tooth!" commented the first.

The sugar happened to be close to Dora's hand on the kitchen-table, and
she gave him two lumps with the command to "sugar off back upstairs as
fast as you like." The craving for sweetness was allayed; but when Mark
had crunched up the two lumps on the dark kitchen-stairs, he was as
lonely as he had been before he left the nursery. He wished now that he
had not eaten up the sugar so fast, that he had taken it back with him
to the nursery and eked it out to wile away this endless afternoon. The
prospect of going back to the nursery depressed him; and he turned aside
to linger in the dining-room whence there was a view of Lima Street,
down which a dirty frayed man was wheeling a barrow and shouting for
housewives to bring out their old rags and bottles and bones. Mark felt
the thrill of trade and traffick, and he longed to be big enough to open
the window and call out that he had several rags and bottles and bones
to sell; but instead he had to be content with watching two
self-important little girls chaffer on behalf of their mothers, and go
off counting their pennies. The voice of the rag-and-bone man, grew
fainter and fainter round corners out of sight; Lima Street became as
empty and uninteresting as the nursery. Mark wished that a knife-grinder
would come along and that he would stop under the dining-room window so
that he could watch the sparks flying from the grindstone. Or that a
gipsy would sit down on the steps and begin to mend the seat of a chair.
Whenever he had seen those gipsy chair-menders at work, he had been out
of doors and afraid to linger watching them in case he should be stolen
and his face stained with walnut juice and all his clothes taken away
from him. But from the security of the dining-room of the Mission House
he should enjoy watching them. However, no gipsy came, nor anybody else
except women with men's caps pinned to their skimpy hair and little
girls with wrinkled stockings carrying jugs to and from the public
houses that stood at every corner.

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